


Port in a Storm: Harbour of Arms

by thegiantkiller (theleaveswant)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Community: apocalyptothon, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-02
Updated: 2007-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:30:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/thegiantkiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mickey wakes in the middle of the night, instinctively counting heartbeats between the flash and the crash, trying to gauge the distance of the storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Port in a Storm: Harbour of Arms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CherryIce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryIce/gifts).



> Prompt was “Mickey-centric, in the alternate universe. Mickey, Jake, Rose, and company fighting the end without the Doctor. Mickey/Jake or Mickey/Jake/Rose would be nice”. Written between series two and three of New Who. Thanks to prairiedaun for the beta.

Mickey wakes in the middle of the night, instinctively counting heartbeats between the flash and the crash, trying to gauge the distance of the storm. It’s not lightning, though, and he knows it’s not. It’s chunks of orbital debris, remnants of the battle raging above their heads day and night for the past eighteen weeks. Spaceship pieces ranging in size from a pebble to a house, all traces of the crews (human and alien) blessedly burned off on their descent through the atmosphere. Torchwood were doing their best to bring an end to the hostilities by any means available (so Rose reported, the privileges of information she earned as an employee), but thus far all attempts at negotiation had been rejected and effective weapons had not yet been developed.

Waiting for his eyes to adjust to the renewed darkness, he reaches out a hand and finds the bed too empty with only two bodies in it. Jake shifts in his sleep, muttering something indistinct. Rose is absent.

Frowning, Mickey sits up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. He probes the floor with his toes until he feels slippers and slides them on. He ends up with one of Jake’s and one of his own. He pulls his robe from the back of a chair and puts that on too, to keep off the cold. They’ve long since stopped worrying about nudity or open doors; they have forgotten, inside this house they share, how to be embarrassed.

If he thought about it, Mickey would say that he liked it better this way, compared to those first few tiptoeing awkward months when they’d tried so hard not to intrude, not to offend. He doesn’t think about it, though, because it’s grown so natural now that he doesn’t even notice.

This is not to say that Mickey does not remember what things were like when they first moved in. Rose had been living with her parents since the connection between dimensions had been terminated. Their parental role, however, was hardly more than nominal: Pete had never known his daughter, had no experience with fatherhood, and Jackie, having been weaned from the role of mother by Rose’s own absenteeism, was now preoccupied with the new family she was starting, for all intents and purposes, from scratch. Playing “house” in Pete’s huge mansion was an idyllic fantasy, and Rose was a tolerated but unappreciated intrusion of reality. So it was that when Mickey mentioned that he and Jake were moving into a two-bedroom townhouse together, Rose had delicately fished for an invitation to crash on their couch—just for a while, to give her parents some privacy. “Stay as long as you like,” Mickey had said.

“And forget the couch,” Jake added, “you can have the second bedroom.”

Rose protested, “Oh no, I don’t want to put either of you out.”

Mickey had hesitated then, looking at Jake. Jake looked back, shrugged and quirked a smile. “It’s no trouble,” he said at last, then paused again, reaching for Jake’s hand. “We only need one.”

“Oh,” Rose had said, puzzled but polite. Then her eyes widened. “ _Oh_ ,” she said again.

For the next week, as she got her stuff (what little she had in this universe that felt like her own) ready to move, and for the first couple of weeks thereafter, Mickey would catch her staring at him. He knew without asking what she was thinking. He’d wondered it himself more than once since deciding to remain in this twisted world. _Who are you?_ Not the Mickey she knew, surely. And he wasn’t; that Mickey was never so comfortable in his own skin. He felt more at home here than he ever had in the reality that made him.

Mickey pads down the narrow corridor in his mismatched slippers to the sitting room at the far end, flinching at the tympanic crash of an aerial detonation.

He’d tried to downplay the situation at first, act as much like his old self as he could remember how. He’d seen how fragile she was after her last (and probably final) encounter with the Doctor on that Norwegian beach (Bad Wolf again . . . he thought they’d solved that puzzle, why did it keep coming back?), and feared upsetting her further. Jake, being more sensible, had no patience for his pussyfooting. They had nothing to be ashamed of, he argued, and denying their relationship wouldn’t change the fact of its existence. The easiest way to get Rose comfortable with it was to act like they were comfortable with it themselves. And it worked, too: by the end of the first month her voice no longer faded to a mutter when they were both around, and her self-conscious fidgeting decreased significantly. The tension had continued to ease over the following months, until the night that changed everything.

That night, like tonight, Mickey woke suddenly, but that time it was a presence, not an absence, that felt out of place, and soft sobbing rather than the boom of “thunder” that disturbed his dreams. He’d pushed up on his elbows, blinking rapidly to clear his eyes, heart in his throat until he recognized the figure silhouetted in the doorway. Her shoulders heaved as she approached the foot of the bed; her feet made no sound on the carpet. “Rose?” he asked, nudging Jake awake. “What’s the matter?”

She trembled with the force of another shuddering sob, raising her hands to scrub at her face with the sleeves of her pyjama top. “Oh, love, don’t,” Jake said, sitting up with arms outstretched. “Come here.” Apparently this permission was exactly what she’d been waiting for, for she crawled with awkward grace onto the bed to position herself between them, throwing herself against Jake’s torso and weeping into his bare collarbone. He stroked her hair and murmured “it’s okay” into her forehead. Mickey, at a loss for what to do, reached out hesitantly to lay a hand on her shoulder, then leaned in to wrap his arms around her. Jake freed his own arms to enclose them both, and they rocked there until all three drifted off to sleep with salt drying on their cheeks.

When the boys woke up that morning, Rose was already downstairs. There was hot coffee on the table, and she was attempting to make pancakes. Jake quickly took over this task so that only the first skillet’s worth got burnt. None of them mentioned the night before. None of them needed to. She’d slept in their bed every night since. It was a tight fit, three people in a double divan, but the inevitability of physical contact had become one of the arrangement’s chief appeals. At first it was casual, platonic, but eventually Mickey and Jake’s romantic life had reasserted itself, and now that too was shared.

Mind returning to the present, he reaches the limen of the sitting room and pauses there with his hand on the doorframe. It takes him a moment to spot her, huddled against the arm of the sofa with her knees to her chest and a blanket around her shoulders. He says her name and she turns her head to blink up at him. “Hi, Mickey.”

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, coming around to sit next to her.

“Bad dreams,” she replies, and he doesn’t probe. Instead he follows her gaze out the window, past the wind-shaken hedge to the sky, watching stars peek out through shreds in the scudding clouds.

It’s July, but there was frost on that hedge the past two mornings. Weather forecasters were blaming it on a temporary failure of the Gulf Stream, but nobody believed them anymore. That afternoon Mickey had overheard a woman discussing it with the androgynously-dressed teen at the supermarket checkout. The kid suggested that it was from all the debris, sucked down from the orbiting battlefield by Earth’s gravity, and opined that it was just like the end of the Cretaceous, when dust from the meteor impact choked the atmosphere and froze the dinosaurs. Whatever it was, it made the crowded bed all the more comfortable.

“I just keep thinking,” Rose says eventually, “even though I know it’s irrational, I keep thinking ‘he’ll come’. ‘Cause with all that’s going on, how can he not? And I know he won’t know me, and I probably won’t know him either—his face, I mean, who knows what sort of face he’d have here—but I feel like I’ve got to keep a watch out for him. ‘Cause he must be on his way, he _must_. Because I know this world is different, and I can understand a world without me in it—I know for a fact there’s one out there right now. But I just can’t imagine a world without the Doctor.”

Mickey thinks this over. “It’s a strange thought, that, true enough. But you’ve got to remember, we _did_ live in a world with no Doctor. Lived there for years with no idea until that whole mannequin thing. So maybe there is a Doctor in this world, and we just don’t know it yet. But just ‘cause he’s there don’t mean he’s the same man we remember. He might not care about Earth, or humans, or saving people. For all we know the Time War never happened here, and the place is crawling with Time Lords. He might be at home now, safe and cozy with a family and everything.”

“He might be happy.”

“Might be.”

“That’s a nice thought.”

“And we’ve got a family here.”

“That’s a nice thought too. You and me and Jake.”

“And your mum and Pete and Baby Replace-o.”

Rose giggles and Mickey opens his arms for her to snuggle against him, which she does with a contented sigh. They wince in unison at another crash, too close for comfort, then get up and retreat hand-in-hand to the bedroom. “But what if he does come?” Rose asks as they slide back under the covers. “What if he comes but it’s too late and this Earth is already gone? I haven’t seen this world’s future; for all I know this could be it, the end of humanity. What if _my_ Doctor finds a way, and we’re all dead? What will he think?”

“He’ll think . . . he’ll be devastated to find you’re gone, but he won’t regret looking for you, because at least he’ll know—somehow—that you loved him to the end, and that you found the strongest port you can get in a storm like this: a safe harbour, sheltered by hearts and arms that love you.”

“There’s a metaphor. But why am I the ship? I love you guys too, shouldn’t I be a seawall or something?”

“A reef,” says Jake sleepily, “full of slippery little fishes.” He pounces suddenly and attacks Rose with tickling fingers, nearly knocking Mickey off the far edge of the bed.

Between the cold crashing outside and the warm laughter within, no human ear could have detected the eerie throb of a materializing TARDIS.


End file.
